Pericles of Athens (25 page)

Admittedly, Pericles’ personal involvement in the enterprise is not documented; even
if the building site was set up in his lifetime, the festival in honor of Hephaestus
was not established until eight years after his death. More troubling still, the
stratēgos
said not a word about the divine ancestry of the Athenians in the funeral oration
that he delivered in 431, in which he went only so far as to mention the remarkable
stability of the Athenian populace ever since its origins: “This land of ours, in
which the same people have never ceased to dwell [
aei oikountes
] in an unbroken line of successive generations, [our ancestors] by their valor transmitted
to our times as a free state.”
³⁴
Rather than put this down to a hypothetical memory lapse on the part of Thucydides,
we should recognize that that lacuna could have been deliberately planned. For this
speech, Pericles had decided to opt for an erotic vocabulary rather than an ancestral
one, in order to describe the Athenians: he wanted his fellow-citizens to fight for
the city as
erastai
would for their
erōmenoi
, not as sons defending their earth-mother.
³⁵

Nevertheless, one detail does show the
stratēgos
’s personal interest in the autochthony tale: the iconography of the statue of Athena
Parthenos. Ensconced at the heart of the Parthenon, this immense effigy, over eleven
meters high from top to toe, constituted “as it were a brief recapitulation of Periclean
themes.”
³⁶
According to Pausanias (1.24.7), “Athena … holds a statue of Victory about four cubits
high, and in the other hand a spear; at her feet lies a shield and near the spear
is a serpent. This serpent would be Erichthonius.” In
this way, at the feet of the goddess there stood the first Athenian, born from the
earth, for whom the city set up a cult on the Acropolis, in the Erechtheum, which
was rebuilt shortly after the
stratēgos
’s death.

It turns out that Pericles was more the herald of civic religion than its hero. Even
if he was actively involved in the ritual functioning of the community, his personal
influence remained limited. He created no new festivals and was responsible for the
construction of no sanctuary (for the Parthenon and the Odeon were not temples, in
the ritualistic sense of the term). As for his direct involvement in the rehandling
of the autochthony story, that cannot be confirmed. The
stratēgos
was thus a spokesman for the civic religion rather than its high priest.

But quite apart from this role as an intermediary, Pericles maintained with the gods
personal relations that the sources take into account, allowing us to catch a glimpse
of his religious convictions or, at least, of the beliefs ascribed to him, sometimes
in order to glorify him, but often so as to denigrate him.

T
HE
P
OSSESSOR OF AN
E
QUIVOCAL
) P
IETY
: A P
ERSONAL
R
ELATIONSHIP WITH THE
D
EITY

The Divine Pericles

According to the ancient sources, Pericles had established privileged links with several
deities in the pantheon. At the time of the construction of the Propylaea, the monumental
entrance to the Acropolis (437–433 B.C.), the
stratēgos
benefited from the personal care of Athena, the poliadic, or City deity. During the
construction work, the most zealous of the workmen slipped and fell from the top of
the edifice. “He lay in a sorry plight, despaired of by the physicians. Pericles was
much cast down by this, but the goddess appeared to him in a dream and prescribed
a course of treatment for him to use, so that he speedily and easily healed the man.
It was in commemoration of this that he set up the bronze statue of Athena Hygieia
on the acropolis near the altar of that goddess, which was there before.”
³⁷

At first sight, there is nothing exceptional about this dream. There was a well-known
practice known as incubation that consisted in the sick receiving in their dreams
a visit or revelations from the deity Asclepius. But such dreams came about only after
the accomplishment of a well-established ritual: first, only the sick person could
ask for a dream; then the god appeared in the sanctuary only after the appropriate
rituals had been performed; and finally, the sick man never himself interpreted the
signs that were sent to him, for that task fell to the deity’s priests.
³⁸
Nothing of the kind happened in the
case of Pericles’ dream: Athena visited the
stratēgos
outside any ritual framework, short-circuiting the traditional mediations and leaving
the dreamer and the goddess face to face. The anecdote thus places Pericles in a privileged
position vis-à-vis the goddess, “as a mediator and quasi-diviner between the goddess
and the wounded man.”
³⁹

That transaction operated, as was often the case, according to the logic of a gift
and a counter-gift. The first gift—the monumental transformation of the Acropolis—elicited
from Athena a response in the shape of a dream sent privately to the
stratēgos
. In return, Pericles offered her a new consecration, which not only completed the
exchange cycle, closing it upon itself, but also commemorated forever his special
close relations with the goddess. It is quite clear that Plutarch was making the most
of an embellished story: the dedication of the statue of Athena Hygieia discovered
by the archaeologists makes no mention at all of the
stratēgos
and refers only to the Athenians; the individual is effaced when confronted by the
collectivity which, in the fifth century, banned all excessive forms of personal distinction.
The fact nevertheless remains that the anecdote testifies to a tradition that is favorable
to Pericles, since it draws attention to the divine protection that he enjoyed—as
did Odysseus in the
Odyssey
.

To draw attention to such a proximity to the gods was nevertheless a risky business,
for the Athenians might interpret it as a sign of concealed tyrannical ambitions.
The Pisistratids had boasted of their privileged relations with the goddess and Pisistratus
had seized power escorted by a false Athena, at the culmination of a ruse that was
never to be forgotten.
⁴⁰
Was Pericles too close to the gods? That was precisely the notion that his detractors
sought to instill in the minds of the Athenians.

His opponents sometimes identified him with Dionysus, “king of the satyrs,”
⁴¹
but it was to Zeus that the
stratēgos
was most frequently assimilated. This was a way of suggesting that Pericles had overstepped
the boundaries of the human condition and had tipped over into overweening hubris.
Plutarch was well aware of the accusation implied by such an association, and he endeavored
explicitly to neutralize such attacks: “it seems to me that his otherwise puerile
and pompous nickname [of “Olympian”] is rendered unobjectionable and becoming by this
one circumstance, that it was so gracious a nature and a life so pure and undefiled
in the exercise of sovereign power.”
⁴²
What could be more unsuitable, in a democracy, than a man who took himself for a
god—worse still, the king of the gods?

That identification was all the more problematic given that, in Athenian theater,
Zeus was often portrayed as a despot who heeded nothing but his own desires: in
Prometheus Bound
, Aeschylus (or Pseudo-Aeschylus) even
depicted Zeus as a tyrant usurping power in order to set up his own whims as laws
(409), without any need for justification (324). So the poet Cratinus aimed to create
alarm when he chose to identify Pericles with the most powerful of all the gods: “Faction
[
stasis
] and Old Cronos were united in wedlock; their offspring was of all the tyrants the
greatest and lo! he is called by the gods the head-compeller.”
⁴³
Such a comparison turned the
stratēgos
into an unscrupulous usurper, prepared to do anything in order to hang on to power.

Cratinus repeated that same accusation, making it more pointed, in his play titled
The Spirits of Wealth
, which was performed in 430–429, at the time when Pericles was under attack from
all quarters for his handling of the war: “Here is Zeus, chasing Cronos from the kingship
and binding the rebellious Titans in unbreakable bonds.”
⁴⁴
Through this analogy, the comic poet covertly evoked the ostracism of Cimon, in 462/1:
confronting Zeus/ Pericles, Cimon was identified with Cronos, a benevolent sovereign,
ousted by his son. As it happened, the parallel was flattering to Pericles’ fallen
rival, for ever since Hesiod, the reign of Cronos had evoked the golden age when “the
grain-giving field bore crops of its own accord, much and unstinting, and they themselves,
willing, mild-mannered, shared out the fruits of their labours, together with many
good things.”
⁴⁵
With this analogy, the comic poet recalled the proverbial generosity of Cimon, which
Plutarch carefully assesses: “[Cimon] made his home in the city a general public residence
for his fellow citizens, and on his estates in the country allowed even the stranger
to take and use the choicest of the ripened fruits, with all the fair things that
the seasons bring. Thus, in a certain fashion, he restored to human life the fabled
communalism of the age of Cronos—the golden age.”
⁴⁶
In this game of masks, the comparison proved extremely disadvantageous to Zeus-Pericles,
who, by getting rid of Cronos-Cimon is implied not only to have established an unjust
tyranny but also to have brought about the end of the golden age.

There was another reason why this “pantheonization” was particularly unpleasant: by
being assimilated to Zeus, Pericles was represented as a flighty lover who disrupted
family life. In this respect, Zeus’s reputation was by now certainly well established.
Seducing both mortals and immortals as he pleased, he had engendered many bastards
all over the world. So it was certainly not by chance that Aspasia was herself seen
as Zeus’s irascible wife Hera : “And Sodomy [
katapugosunē
] produced for Cronos this Hera-Aspasia, the bitch-eyed concubine.”
⁴⁷
Inevitably, the analogy rebounded against the
stratēgos
’s partner and also his bastard son, Pericles the Younger.

These often alarming and sometimes grotesque jokes cracked by the comic poets were
intended to provoke laughter and alarm among the spectators and, as such, were inclined
to reflect the fantasies of Pericles’ opponents
rather than Pericles’ own religious thinking. In order to get some idea of his own
deeper convictions, we need to turn to other sources that are, unfortunately, equally
biased.

A Clear Head or a Weak Mind?

In the few accounts that bear upon his personal beliefs, Pericles appears to be torn
between two diametrically opposed positions. At one moment, the
stratēgos
is presented as a defender of rationalist thinking, cursorily dismissing all supernatural
interpretations; at other times, he is presented as a supporter of traditional religion
or even a religion that never looked beyond superstition.
⁴⁸
Choosing between these two alternatives, many contemporary historians have often
seemed to favor the former, even going so far as to represent Pericles as an
aufklärer
(an enlightenment figure), the herald of a world moving toward secularization.
⁴⁹